


Almost Alice

by TardisInWonderland



Category: Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 10:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisInWonderland/pseuds/TardisInWonderland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice has never been <i>normal</i>. Ever since she was little, her childhood fever dreams of a different world have haunted her, and her father's mysterious death forces her to go back to a place where her fantasy world mingles with reality: her grandmother's country estate. There is truth in every fairy tale, no matter how small.</p><p>Setting is modern, rather than Victorian, just to play around with the contrast between Wonderland and the real world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Alice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tjmystic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjmystic/gifts).



> I honestly have no clue if I'll be continuing with this or not. I just wanted to play around with what Alice's character and her family might be like in a more modern context. I saw someone said one time that there should be "alternate universe" and "universe altered." This is the latter.
> 
> For TJ, who has always encouraged my writing in every way. Feel better, dear!

Rain.

It seemed like that was all it ever did in England. _Rain_.

And it wasn’t as if she could go out exploring in the rain, either. Her mother would have a fit if she dared to go anywhere in this kind of weather, even if it was just out for a bit around the grounds. She’d come in sopping wet (straight off to take a shower and change clothes, mind) and no excuses would be enough. Mothers seemed to have quite a lot against rainy weather…

Alice Kingsleigh, for her part, had never thought that there was anything at all wrong with tromping about in the rain, regardless of whatever her mother thought. It was why she had somehow managed to get herself out to the gazebo in her grandmother’s garden, sitting barefoot under the sturdy wooden roof with a book and watching the rain fall, though in truth it had not been raining when she first came outside. It just happened to be a wonderful excuse to sit and watch it rain. This solitary spot was tucked away in a corner of the rather obnoxious hedge maze behind her grandmother’s country home, the outside of the structure covered in vines and more weeds than grass in the lawn surrounding it. No one would be able to find her here.

Alice had always thought of rain as pure and peaceful, straight out of the heavens to land in your palm, cool and soothing on a muggy summer day. She had stood outside in the rain one day after school, when she was eight years old and snuck away from Margaret.

As the memory surfaced, Alice unconsciously stretched out her hand from under the gazebo’s roof, cool water landing on her too-warm skin. That day in the rain so long ago seemed so nearby now. The water had plastered her jeans to her legs and made her cotton t-shirt heavy, but she hadn’t cared. The feel of the rain running down her face- landing on her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, dripping on her head and sliding down through her messy hair- was intoxicating. It was a letter from a long-lost friend, it was the first warm day after the snow melted, it was a thousand lover’s kisses landing over and over on her face, her arms, her fingertips…

And it was something not unlike pure _freedom_.

Freedom that she’d been denied ever since.

Alice had caught a cough, then a cold, and then pneumonia shortly after the rain incident. Ever since then, her entire family had watched her like hawks, policing everything she did and everywhere she went, for fear that something more than the bacteria had gotten into her while she was sick. While she had pneumonia, she dreamed the strangest fever dreams, dreams that still haunted her to this day… there was a woman with a head too large for her body, a rabbit with a peculiar coat, a fluffy cat, a man rather overly fond of his top hat… Her father had been the only one who never judged. He never thought she was silly or stupid or- God forbid- _mad_.

_“You’re bonkers, completely off your rocker… but I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”_

She jerked her hand away, back under the gazebo, wiping off the water onto her shorts and shaking herself out of her daze. It was important to remember why she was here.

Her father was dead, and they were here to mourn him.

Charles Kingsleigh had disappeared last month. Vanished entirely. He told his family he was going on a business trip, but when they called him he never picked up his cell phone, and his hotel said that he never checked in. A very surprised fisherman found his car in a lake two weeks later, suitcases still packed and dark red stains on the tan interior that couldn’t be anything but blood.

There was never a body, but the truth was obvious to everyone involved.

Everyone except Alice.

She didn’t believe it. It was too fast, too strange, too… something. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel… final. Margaret said it was grieving, that it was natural not to believe it or not to _want_ to believe it. Perhaps she was right- Alice’s older sister had always had a knack for these things, even when she had moved out and gotten married several years before, and Alice had a niece and nephew.

After Charles’ death, Alice and her mother had moved from their flat in London to Ella Kingsleigh’s large country house- nicknamed Kingsleigh Manor by the local folk- almost immediately, both for financial reasons and to oversee Grandmother’s health. As far as Alice was concerned, Grandmother’s health didn’t _need_ overseeing, but she’d requested they’d come and stay. In reality, it was more likely that Ella thought her daughter-in-law and granddaughter needed support while grieving, both because Ella was the sole owner of ninety-six percent of the family’s business wealth and because family is a good thing to have in times of trouble… and she wasn’t wrong.

The drive from Alice and her mother’s flat in London to Grandmother’s country estate hadn’t been pleasant, mostly because they were accompanied by Alice’s sister, Margaret, and all three were testy, distressed, argumentative, and in general very bad traveling companions (though it was understandable under the circumstances). It was easiest for Alice to remain silent in the backseat, buried in the pages of a worn copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and ears stopped up with headphones. There was no point in making idle chatter when everything seemed so irrelevant, and she’d already heard far too much discussion and debate about her father’s death...

Mostly because no one knew for sure if he’d actually died.

Though the move came as a shock on top of an already stressful situation, it was good to move away from London in many ways. The family support helped, if only to know that there were other people grieving, and for the first time in a long time Alice found a friend in her family, someone who understood her. Someone who not only allowed her to prattle, but _encouraged_ it, and prattled back in her own way.

Ella Kingsleigh and her granddaughter may have been forty-six years apart in age, but they were kindred spirits, and that was something Alice had ever found.

Out here, away from people and promises that couldn’t be kept, was a nice change from bustling city life. There were acres of fields and forests to explore by day and by night, beautiful gardens, a house that was just a little too old and dusty to be completely normal… granted, the internet was patchy, the plumbing was noisy, and the place was so large that it actually took a number of staff members to keep it in order, but for Alice it was perfect. Quirky houses suited her- she was, at least compared to the rest of her business-minded, stable-job-finding family, a very quirky person. She could concentrate on her artwork here, sketching or painting away for hours without anyone to bother her, or worse, to _judge_ her.

When Grandmother found out about Alice’s creative side, she hadn’t blinked and politely remarked on how… _unique_ … her style was. She hadn’t asked her why she was painting the things she was, or why she insisted on painting a few of the same things over and over in between her other works. She hadn’t asked why she liked to try new things all the time, like sewing (drastic failure for the most part in which blood was drawn), making jewelry from unconventional things (usually lace, other old jewelry, and whatever else she found lying around), burning the sides of random things with candle flames (long story), or even the one afternoon that Alice decided to try an experiment with melted crayons and a spare hair dryer (surprising success, though there were burns involved).

She’d laughed happily at the story of the time Alice tried to paint the roses in the garden red, said it was a marvelous idea from such a tiny girl.

She didn’t tell her that she was insane for wanting to live off her artwork one day. She didn’t laugh off her stories about wanting to travel the world and see all the things she painted. She didn’t pointedly ignore the strange sketches of stranger characters that came purely from her mind. She didn’t tell her that art school was out of the question and impossible.

Contrarywise, Ella Kingsleigh gave her granddaughter the attic.

The enormous attic of the house, while dusty and disused, was quiet, with large windows to let in the sunlight on one side and a sloped ceiling on the other. There was a spiral staircase leading up to the trap door from the room given to Alice as her bedroom for the sole purpose of attic access. The bedroom looked normal enough, albeit with enough artwork on the walls that no one actually knew what color the paint was any longer, but above it was Alice’s _world_. The attic had turned into her studio, into a tiny little world of her own. She had free reign of the hedge maze, the gardens, and the grounds, soon learning her way around without trouble and finding plenty of little places to disappear.

And 19-year-old Alice, in a state of mourning, confusion, and loneliness, couldn’t ask for anything more.

The gazebo was only one of her hiding places, though it was debatably the best. The hedges were tall enough and the roof ivy-covered enough that it was invisible from every angle until you were standing in front of it, and the path to reach the clearing was complicated. Even the gardeners seemed to have neglected this particular part of the maze.

It was a good thing today, though. Being alone was a good thing.

Alice, Margaret, and Helen had been at Kingsleigh Manor for roughly three weeks now. Helen Kingsleigh, Alice’s mother, along with Margaret and her husband were greeting the arriving family members from all around the country. The house was more than large enough to host the family for a few days as they all gathered together for the funeral.

Bloody vultures.

That was all they were, just scavengers, picking up things dropped in a time of mourning, hoping that something was bequeathed to them and taking whatever scraps they could find if nothing was. Free food for the weekend, free lodging, an excuse to take a trip to the country…

Alice couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand the shallow sentiments behind judging eyes. She couldn’t stand the disapproving looks at the paint under her fingernails or the pencil smudges on her hands. She couldn’t stand how the other women eyed her cutoff jeans, tank tops, bare feet, and messily pulled back hair with distaste next to Margaret’s flowing skirts, kitten heels, and perfect blonde curls. She couldn’t stand how the whole family thought that art and traveling was not a career, and she should take an office job in her father’s company… well, who knows whose company it was now. She couldn’t stand the whispers, the rumors about Charles’ little girl and how the fever dreams had driven her utterly mad, and how he hadn’t done anything about it.

They were all wrong.

Grandmother was the only one who understood anymore, really. Alice had been dreading a visit to Kingsleigh Manor, but after spending some time with her grandmother the prospect of living here didn’t seem so bad. Every time a relative came by to express their condolences managed to express incredible distaste for the way Alice lived her life, Grandmother would say absolutely nothing… until they left.

_“Don’t mind them, duckie. So what if you’re a little bit messy- they’ve got about the talent of a stick and half the personality.”_

But this time there was no Grandmother to help her through the stares and the silent ridicule. This time Grandmother had disappeared, off to talk to who knows who doing who knows what, and Alice was all alone. Most of the time she could take it, but not on this scale. Not with so many people all judging her, the stress of why they were all here… the tiny little Alice, nine years old and fever dreaming, came back.

And she ran to the gazebo.

And she drew.

It was a man, drawn in black at white, wearing a long coat and a very large top hat. His very character was so utterly full of color that, to Alice, it almost seemed like a crime to draw him in black and white. His hair stuck out at impossible angles from his head- orange, almost like a clown, and indeed many people assumed he was a clown when they first saw Alice’s portraits of him- and he wore a sash made of spools of thread.

And his eyes- oh, his _eyes_ \- they were such a bright green, such a _particular_ green, that Alice had never been able to properly duplicate it.

That was why she had started drawing in the first place, really. She’d wanted to show the world what her mind showed her. She’d wanted everyone to be able to see this wonderful, beautiful place as clearly as she saw it in her mind, but her little girl’s hands couldn’t form the lines on the page or the words of mouth to describe it properly.

And people laughed.

They laughed constantly- behind her back and to her face. They laughed about the world she called Wonderland, and they kept on laughing until they’d laughed Alice right out of London for good. That was fine with her, though- let them laugh. Over the years she’d learned to ignore it, to move on with whatever she was doing and hide the delusions, hide the fantasies and the imaginings. She’d learned to go to the psychiatrist if she had to, but she never divulged anything and the visits eventually stopped when Alice stopped talking about Wonderland.

The drawings didn’t stop.

It was her father’s idea. He knew the dreams still haunted her because it was him she would run into walking down the hall to the kitchen for a glass of milk after dreaming of screaming women with oversize heads and mice that lived in teapots. They wouldn’t just go away, not without help, and he knew it… so he suggested that Alice let them out. Give her dreams room to breathe, he said, let them into the world, and they might just be happy enough out there not to come back into your head.

It just happened to work out that she liked art enough to continue with it…

But the drawings never drew the dreams out of her head.

Alice drew the screaming woman sometimes, and the cat fairly often. Sometimes there was a mouse, and other times a rabbit (though there was definitely one rabbit who liked tea and another completely different one who constantly ran around in a panic). However, there were few of her fictions that she truly _enjoyed_ drawing. Most of the time she drew them for the same reasons her father told her- they needed to come out, on something in some way, or they would drive her mad.

Alice did enjoy portraying the white woman, though her eyebrows always seemed strangely black, and she enjoyed drawing the man with the top hat. They made her feel happy- at peace, even- made her remember better times, times with tea and her father, outside in the summer, times when she and Margaret didn’t fight so often, times when everything was possible and nothing in the world cold stop her…

But those times were gone now, replaced by rain and sighs and half-done drawings.

Alice sighed, impatiently running a hand through her gently curling mass of blonde hair. For now, there was nowhere she could go without an umbrella- drenched was one thing for her, but quite another for her book of drawings- so she would simply sit and wait until the rain stopped.

Lost in thought, she barely noticed the rustling sound from the pathway leading to the gazebo. In fact, it would have been practically impossible to hear over the pitter-patter of the rain if it weren’t for the _voice_.

“Oh dear. Oh my. Almost out of time!”

Alice turned to look, but all she saw was a rabbit hopping by the gazebo.

A rabbit wearing a blue coat.

She shook her head, blinking, but the rabbit was already gone. And besides, why would a talking rabbit wearing a dress coat be hopping about in the rain? _Alice_ , she thought suddenly, _I think the actual question here is why would a rabbit be_ talking _and wearing a_ dresscoat _?_

Besides, rabbits couldn’t talk. Surely it was just one of the younger members of the family lost in the maze a few hedges over… They’d find their way out eventually- it wasn’t terribly difficult to find your way to the center if you kept at it, and from there the path leading to the front lawn was clearly marked.

“No, wrong way, wrong way!”

Alice outright jumped when the rabbit came skidding into the gazebo clearing, blue dress coat buttoned and looking at a… a watch? On top of that, he seemed to be babbling to himself. She couldn’t help it- she stared outright. This wasn’t just any rabbit.

It was her rabbit.

The one from her dreams.

The rabbit looked up, ears twitching, its beady pink eyes meeting hers. Alice and the rabbit stared at each other for a long moment, both of them still as stone.

“Oh, dear,” the rabbit mumbled, and then took off back into the maze.

Alice’s sketchbook dropped out of her hand onto the dry gazebo floor, and she took off after the rabbit without a second thought. The rain soaked through her shirt and shorts, running down her legs as she bounded after the rabbit with long strides, bare feet splashing through the newly-formed mud puddles on the grassy maze path. Her shoes and socks had been abandoned in a pile when she went after the rabbit- there wasn’t time to put them on.

She followed the animal through twists and turns, around paths, through clearings, so fast that she couldn’t tell where she was going any longer. Nothing looked familiar any longer, slowly twisting itself into a path she didn’t know and a destination even more mysterious.

And Alice ran, and there was only the rabbit, the maze, and the rain...

And when she finally turned a corner and found that she was facing the woods, there was nothing. An empty field, a green No Man’s Land between the hedge maze and the trees beyond.

The rabbit had disappeared.

 


End file.
